Education

As one of the key factors for economic prosperity, education is extremely important. From closing the widely-documented achievement gap between African-Americans and Caucasians to educational interventions, our sciences are improving student performance and achievement.

Improvements in Academic Performance

The creation by psychologists, computer scientists and educators of one-to-one intelligent tutoring systems provides new opportunities for effective, interactive, on-demand learning at a fraction of the cost of human tutors. These intelligent tutoring systems teach physics, computer literacy, and scientific reason and have been shown to improve achievement by approximately one letter grade. 1,2

Closing the Achievement Gap

An artificially intelligent system created by mathematical psychologists has shown promise in closing the widely documented achievement gap between African-Americans and Caucasians. After a yearlong afterschool math support program, researchers found no difference in math scores of African-American and Caucasian sixth graders. In research on college-level behavioral statistics courses, the performance gap seen between African-Americans and Caucasians in lecture-format classes did not exist in the technologically-based classes. 3,4

Academic Improvements

Social psychologists demonstrated that brief writing exercises reminding students of their core personal values improved African-American students’ achievement and decreased the difference between White and African-American students’ grades by 40% over a semester. After 2 years, African American students’ GPAs increased significantly especially among those who were initially low achieving. 5-7

Academic Improvements

Educational interventions based on social psychological theories have led to marked improvements in student achievement. College students who learned that low grades were typical early in college but then improve showed an increase of .27 grade points and were 80% less likely to drop out of college compared to students who did not learn this information. In another study, low-income seventh graders who learned that intelligence can be developed showed a significant increase in grade points compared to students who did not get this information. 8,9